Free The Devil's Mask by Christopher Wakling Page B

brush to uncover his precious fossils. We must be as subtle. Now’s not the time for a spade.’

Sixteen
    Noises filter in from the outside world, and the repetition of these noises creates patterns, and familiarity, and the creeping threat that this place will start to make sense. The same thing happened on the ship. Human resourcefulness and adaptability are a curse: despite everything, they will normalise hell.
    So, the fact that there is a bucket with water here, and one for them to fill, because it is an improvement on the filth-flooded hold, becomes a privilege. The same is true of the straw. The cows at home sleep on a softer bed, but it is better than the dark planks she had grown used to during the first voyage, and when the man comes to spread a fresh sheaf on the ground she has to fight a sickening gratitude. Yesterday, after he had kicked clean straw around the cellar, he took a key from his pocket and unchained Idowu and took her away. There were no tears left in the sick girl, but Abeni and Oni held each other and sobbed for her, which changed nothing.
    Oni thinks about the insult of this clean straw and gathers an armful and pushes it away as far as she can, and then she clears all the straw from within the circumference of her chain, exposing a half circle of bare dirt. You can taste the damp in it, the mould. She starts digging with her fingers. She’s not trying to escape, she’s digging because the futility of it is an antidote to the fake normality.
    She has no way of protecting herself when she’s asleep. There’s  no such thing as a good dream. She can sleep through the happiest memories – a kingfisher arrowing into the mirrored lake-surface beside her father’s canoe; the pink instep of her brother’s foot held warm against her lips – and still wake up screaming. In some ways nightmares are easier. The rat gnawing at the base of her skull, the gag and rope and weight of him forcing her apart.
    She’s still scraping at the floor. They took Idowu away. She cannot allow herself to imagine where, or what has happened to the sick girl since. There are pebbles in the dirt which she digs free, and then further into the hole her fingers close over a knot that won’t budge. She picks at the soil around it, uncovering a length of tree-root as thick as her wrist. That this root feeds a living tree is momentarily comforting. But though its roots share Oni’s cell, the tree’s leaves must reach up into the light. She pushes the earth back into the hole and drags a clump of straw across it with her heel.
    Suddenly, there’s the birdsong again, whose faint melodies are as terrifying as the smile of a snake.

Seventeen
    The light was fading in Queen Square. Shadows cast by the plane trees stretched in long diagonals, streaks of tar thrown across a dirt floor. I paused outside Lilly’s house. I brushed myself down and attempted to rearrange the flowers. A bouquet had seemed the right thing when I bought it from the flower-girl outside the Exchange at lunchtime, but the thing had a limp, doomed air about it now. I was looking forward to seeing Lilly again, of course. The twinge of uncertainty in my belly had nothing to do with my fiancée, and everything to do with my prospective father-in-law. The invitation I had accepted for this evening came from Heston Alexander himself. If I found myself talking nonsense to brush over the awkwardness between myself and Lilly’s mother from time to time, my confusion before her father welled up into ridiculousness. I took a deep breath and set my jaw and raised my hand to the lion’s head mounted high on the big front door … which opened before I had a chance to knock upon it.
    The footman, Spenser, had either intuited my loitering on the steps or spotted me from a window. His bow was an inch or two deeper than necessary. A pianoforte was playing somewhere within. I followed the man further into the